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It was 1977 and I was on my first date.   It wasn't night, actually, but late afternoon, unremittingly frigid and dreary as only Chicago winter Saturdays can be.   I was eleven.  The boy's name was Toby, and he was also eleven, in my sixth-grade class at school.   He liked Abba.   I liked Rod Stewart.   When the weather was warm we biked over to each other's houses and listened to each other's records.   Sometimes we toted along our pet guinea pigs in our bike baskets so they could visit each other.   My guinea pig had short, sleek black hair and was named Streaker.  Toby's guinea pig, whose name I don't remember, was an exotic long-haired Peruvian and resembled a mop.

We'd met the year before, in fifth grade.   He ran up behind me on the playground while I was talking to my friends and kicked my butt as hard as he could, then ran off laughing.   We all knew what that meant.  He was a cute kid, skinny and freckled, with shiny white-blond hair in a classic '70s bowl cut and an incongruously deep, husky voice that stayed pretty much the same even after it officially changed a few years later.   I was also skinny and freckled, but my hair was long and almost black.  I wondered what it felt like to have blonde hair.  Did you feel being blonde inside yourself?   Maybe Toby wondered the same/opposite about me.

I don't recall how we escalated from Abba-listening and guinea-pig-sharing to an actual date.  Kids in our class were beginning to talk about "going steady" and "make-out parties," but it never seemed to occur to Toby and me to make out.  We never even held hands, though we spent a lot of time teaching our guinea pigs to shake hands.

So, the date was mysteriously arranged.   Toby's father would drive us to The Axle Roller Rink, and my mother would pick us up a few hours later.   I wished I were not so skinny and flat-chested, and I hated my size 9 feet.  Sideways, I looked like the letter "L."  I was saving up to order a bottle of Super Wate-On, which I'd seen advertised in the back of magazines.   On the day of the date, though, I felt pretty.  You were supposed to look pretty on dates, and I did.   I wore my new pink-and-white-striped cowl neck sweater with a drawstring waist.   I brushed my hair.  I sprayed on Love's Baby Soft cologne.   I brought my pocket comb.

The roller rink was huge and crowded and deafeningly loud, vibrating with motion and sound, a cavernous arena whirling with people and flashing orange lights and amplified music and the roar of wheels on wood.   Toby and I shouted a few words to each other and then gave up.   Much too loud to talk.  We laced on our skates and got on the floor and were whipped around and around, sometimes together, sometimes separated by the crowd, periodically clomping and stumbling our way back out onto the periphery, over to the refreshment area where we drank orange soda from waxed paper cups.   Even in the refreshment area it was too loud to talk.  Toby looked perplexed, but not unhappy.  I felt shaken by the noise and chaos, but also exhilarated, like a teenager on a real date.   I excused myself and visited the restroom.

There, everything changed.  In the mirror I got a shock.  I was not the beautiful Breck girl on a date.  I was a messy, wild-eyed kid with sweaty stringy hair plastered to her face and soda stains on her flat polyester chest.   My comb couldn't fix it, Bonne Bell Lip Smackers couldn't fix it.  The problem wasn't even how I looked, but the disconnect:  how I felt inside - happy, grown-up, free - had nothing to do with how I looked on the outside.   It hit me all at once - the ridiculous, artificial, relentless work that would be required of me.  Of girls.

Never again would I think of dating as easy or remotely natural, nor would I recover the innocence of that moment just before I looked in the mirror.  I don't remember the rest of that afternoon at The Axle.  Nothing terrible happened.   Toby and I did not end up "going steady," whatever that meant, but neither did we suffer through a break-up.  We were, after all, just kids.

"What has the absence of worry to do with beauty?" asks a character in my favorite novel of all time, Jane Bowles's Two Serious Ladies.  Her friend answers, "When you wake up in the morning and the first minute you open your eyes and you don't know who you are or what your life has been - that is beautiful."

Countless girls have similar preteen revelations, I'm sure, and respond by wisely, self-protectively turning their focus to softball, the debate team, Breyer horses.  I on the other hand threw myself back into the fray with an idiot vengeance.  Within a year or two, I was making out with the rabbi's son in a public park, skipping high school and making whichever college boy I was sleeping with pretend to be my uncle and call in sick for me, piercing my own ears repeatedly until they got infected, setting my alarm for 5 AM so I'd have time to apply multiple coats of Great Lash before the bell rang for 7:30 homeroom. 

Actually, those activities now strike me as pretty innocent.   They even sound kind of fun - certainly better than the tedious middle-aged attempts at "romance" going off like dud fireworks all around me these days, in real life and on the Lifetime Movie Network and in Viagra commercials.  Is it possible I lost nothing at the roller rink, after all?   Is it slutty to wear lip gloss after forty?